CAS

This year I have started a new service in which we work with a service partner called 4PM. In this service we will be helping children with a lower socioeconomic background, to give them more confidence and expose them to new experiences by doing activities involving the arts. This is a very important issue as income inequality is what often leads to people being less fortunate. As a result, educating people about how serious the issue is, and providing less fortunate people with opportunities and experiences is critical.

While I haven’t done this exact activity before, I have had some experience in some of the aspects of what we will be doing. In the past, I have worked with young children in service, so I know what it is like to have this group of people as the target audience for the activities we plan. Furthermore, I have been involved in the arts such as music, and really enjoy doing them, which is what initially made me want to participate in this service.

Before actually working with the children, we have been analysing our own strengths and weaknesses to see how we can best benefit the children from 4PM. As a result of this stage and being in this service, I have found that my ability to plan and think about what activities would be most beneficial is quite strong. This is because I understand the type of activities we are meant to be organising and the group of people it is for. However, I think I would like to improve on my communication skills when we actually are doing the activities and working with the children. This is because communicating with them is quite challenging as they are very young and not yet fluent at speaking. As well as this, when I don’t know the people I am talking with very well, I find it harder to communicate with them as we don’t really know each other. As a result of this I think that this service will be a great experience for me and will really help me to improve my communication skills as this is the area I find that I need to work on the most.

#LO1 #LO6

#CAS

I have recently been doing a marimba ensemble in school in Grade 11 which I have also done in previous years as I have always enjoyed music. Revisiting it this year again will allow me to not only develop my music skills further but will also help with my collaboration skills as when working together in a music ensemble, collaboration is critical. This is because everyone has to know what their part is within the piece and where it fits in so that the end result will be the best possible performance.

Over the first few weeks of doing this activity I have had to collaborate with other students within the ensemble so that our parts would fit together cohesively. This started off being quite challenging as people learnt how to play their parts at different rates which lead to some people being ready to start fitting it together while others were still increasing their fluency. As well as this while trying to put the parts together we all had to be playing at the same tempo and listen to where to come into the music. Thinking about all these things made it quite challenging to start off with but after practising a little it has started to get a little easier. I think that in order for us to perform our pieces well in the future, collaboration will continue to be very important so that we sound like an ensemble playing a piece with many different layers. A way that I may be able to help improve this is by helping teach people who don’t understand the part how to play it if I know how to already, since I have done this activity before and have skills in this area. I can also contribute to this myself by listening carefully to where my part fits into the piece as a whole.

Overall, I think that the start of my creativity part of CAS has been going quite well and that while there are some things I can improve on, I have been enjoying my time playing in a music ensemble.

#LO1 #LO5

#CAS